Our family keeps a pretty rigorous schedule, with nearly every night of the week blocked out for some activity or another, but rather than shuttling between soccer games and dance practice, like many parents in our social group, we're shuttling between different 12 Step meetings.

So, a week ago, as I was lying in bed making the decision to try to attend my first Overeater's Anonymous (OA) meeting, my first thought was: How am I going to fit this in? I mean, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday nights as well as Saturday mornings are booked. What if the only meeting in the area meets on Monday nights? Am I willing to give up my COSA Step group for a new meeting? Or what if it's on Tuesday nights? I definitely can't do it then. But if it's on Fridays, well that's one of the few nights we have together as a family...

Then I realized I was (as usual) getting ahead of myself. I took a deep breath, stopped myself from running to the computer right away to look up meeting times and told myself to wait until morning to see how things actually stood and take it from there. The next morning, I typed in my ZIP code, selected a wide radius and hoped there would be one meeting I could somehow squeeze in. I remembered when, shortly after discovering my husband's sex addiction, I was looking for a meeting for partners of sex addicts. There was just one meeting for just one group within a fifty mile radius of my home, and that group consisted of only four or five women.

So, when the OA search results came back, I had to laugh. There were dozens of meetings at all times of the day, every day. I could easily fit in a meeting while the kids were at school any day of the week. And when I attended the meeting. Wow. There were dozens of people: more people there than in any of the sessions I attended at COSA's International Convention and enough people to volunteer for all sorts of positions that the groups I've attended have never been able to support. (We're lucky if we can support secretary, treasurer and literature person without having to double up on responsibilities.)

It made me wonder (not for the first time) where all the friends and family members of sex addicts were hiding. And as thrilling as it was to be in a room with that much recovery, and to have access to so many meetings in my area for a problem I'm struggling with, it also made me sad that the same vibrant community is so hard to find for those struggling to heal from the wounds of sex addiction.

I remember the first time I ever saw my husband; I even remember what he was wearing. It was our first week of college, and he was standing in line behind me, wearing Coke bottle glasses, a white, retro (to put it kindly), marching band t-shirt with red trim and red polyester running shorts with white trim. I took one look at him and said to myself, "Oh my God! He's, like, a total dweeb." (We met in the 80's. That was how I talked to myself back then.) So, yeah, not exactly love at first sight. He took some getting used to.

But I have had that experience of seeing someone for the very first time and having my world turn upside down, of feeling both that I could do anything and that I was going to collapse at any moment under the weight of all that love. The person in question was crying and bloody at the time I met him; his skin was a horrifying hue of purplish-grey and his face that looked something like a cross between a monkey and a space alien. But I thought he was the most amazing thing I had ever seen, and right there, the moment he was born, I loved my son Austen with all my heart. "This," I thought, "is where I'm meant to be."

Walking into my first 12 Step meeting more than six years ago was a lot more like meeting my husband than meeting my son. It was a meeting for friends and family members of sex addicts, and I was firmly convinced that I didn't belong there.  I felt awkward and out of place.  I couldn't relate to what people were sharing about.  Oh, and those other people in the meeting? They were crazy!  (But don't tell them I said that.)  It took time to realize I had my own issues to deal with and to start to feel comfortable with a group.  I love the COSA meetings I attend now, but it was a long process: certainly not love at first sight. Like my husband, my recovery around my codependency and his sex addiction took some getting used to.

I've heard people talk about their first experience in a meeting, of walking in and saying, "I totally belong here.  There's hope!  Thank you, God, for this group."  It sounded so wonderful to walk into a meeting and feel that kind of instant love and relief.  And being the spiritually enlightened being that I am, I was always terribly jealous.  I wished my love of COSA had been less of a hard fought battle with my own denial and more an instant connection.

But yesterday, I had that experience at last.  In honor of my Year of Health, I decided it was finally time to go to an Overeaters Anonymous (OA) meeting and deal with my issues around food.  And walking into that OA meeting was 12 Step love at first sight.  I could relate to every share.  I was nodding my head at every word and saying, "Yep, that's me," or "Wow, I didn't know other people did that too," or "I thought I was the only one who felt that way."  I was in a room full of people who relate to food in the same compulsive way I do, I was in a place where I was ready to see and admit it, and I could finally say, right there at the first meeting, just like the first time I saw my son, "This is where I'm meant to be."

Earlier this month, I decided I was going to set aside one day each week for spirituality and health, a sort of personal Sabbath.  I picked a day of the week and made some rules for myself and set about my spiritual experiment. This week will be my fourth "Sabbath," and while three weeks is hardly enough to see substantial change, I have noticed some interesting things.

1. It's hard to break out of my routine and not do my usual work. It's like the first time I sat in meditation and was there for about fifteen seconds and thought, "Ok, is this over yet? Can I get up now and do something?" I feel like there are all of these Really Important Things I should be taking care of and I get anxious and jittery about them. Which brings me to...
2. There are no Really Important Things that I must do right now.  When I turn my computer back on on Thursdays, the world hasn't ended.  There haven't been thousands of items clamoring for my attention.  Everything was just fine waiting a day, and in fact, very few people even noticed that I was off-line at all.  In spite of this, I still worry that this is going to be the week that there really will be something earth shattering in its importance dropping into my inbox.
3. I use sugar to self-medicate my stress.
4. I haven't felt any closer to God. And because of this, I've realized that I expected to have some transcendent spiritual moments on my Wednesdays, especially given that I am spending much more time in prayer and meditation than on a normal day.  But I haven't experienced those moments.  So far my Wednesdays have felt like any other day (minus sugar and electronics).  I'm not making a judgment on that, just sitting with it and noticing what my expectations were and what the reality is.
5. The day after my Sabbath is wonderful. So far, while my Wednesdays themselves have had difficult moments and have lacked anything overtly transcendent, they have acted as a reset button for my habits and my week.  The day after I'm a little more relaxed and a little more likely to do little things to take care of myself that I overlook at other times.

I've learned a little more and a little something different each week, so I intend to continue the practice of setting aside Wednesdays for spirituality and continue to observe how it goes.

Last week, I asked you all to join the Just for Today Challenge with me, where we would all change one thing about our lives for just one day. I'll share what I did, and if you did something yourself, either share about it in the comments or (if you wrote a post about it) enter the URL for the post in Mister Linky below to add a link to your blog.  (This is my first attempt to incorporate Mister Linky, so I'm hoping everything will go smoothly.  Just in case, I'd encourage you to leave a comment too, at least this time.  I'm going to try to make this an ongoing thing, so hopefully I'll work out the kinks as I go.)

As many of you know, I've instituted a day of rest and spirituality for myself every Wednesday, and each Wednesday I'm thinking of focusing on one change I'd like to make.  This week the big challenge was cutting out sugar.  Now some of you might think, "It's not hard to go just one day without sugary treats!"  Well, good for you, apparently you're not addicted to them.  For me, it was hard: really, really, crushingly hard to go the entire day without sugar (and because I only take my caffeine in soda form, caffeine as well).

Actually, that's not entirely true.  I got up in the morning and said, "No, no. No chocolate PopTart for you today!  We're having a bagel instead."  And that wasn't so bad.  Then I ate lunch and I wanted a Coke with it, but I settled for water.  And I wanted some Halloween candy for dessert and my hand was reaching for the bowl, but I pulled it back and said, "I can go just one day without a mini Snickers!"

But then the kids came home from school, and I felt like I was drowning in "Mama, I want..." and "Mama, I need..." and "Mama, where is..." and "Mama, can I [insert insane and dangerous request here]..." and "Mama, Daddy said I could..." and "But he started it" and "No, she started it" and "No, he did!"  I wanted one of those freaking Halloween candies so bad I was ready to tear my hair out.  And I wanted to wash it down with a can of Coke.  So I stopped taking things one day at a time and took them one minute at a time for the few hours until Mark got home from work.  Once Mark was home, I had dinner, went off to my meditation group and came home to the kids asleep.  And I thought about that pumpkin pie in the fridge, but I didn't need it.

So, I learned that I really use sugar and caffeine to handle the stress of juggling the kids' needs and demands, of setting limits and enforcing rules, of just the plain sensory overload of two kids focusing their attention on me.  And I learned that one day without sugar was hard, but it also acted like a reset button: the next day, I didn't crave sugar as much and while I let myself indulge again, I ate (and drank) less of it than at any time in the last few months.  I've also noticed that my sugar intake has gradually increased over the course of the week, creeping not quite back up, but closer, to where it had been before.

Still, it's comforting to know that my one day a week of change could be a way of hitting reset on a lot of things in my life, and I'm looking forward to testing the theory with some other behaviors.  And I want to know how your one day worked for you!  What did you add to your life or give up?  What did it feel like and what did you learn?  Post a link and/or leave a comment.  And feel free to pick a day and a behavior yourself and join in next Tuesday too.  If you participated this week, you can keep it up with the same thing this week or choose something new.  It's up to you.

Mr. Linky:

I've been working through the 12 Steps again, more slowly this time than my last time through.  This week, I worked through an exercise where I looked at patterns of compulsive behavior in my life and I was struck (again) by how powerfully my life is dominated by fear and by how much I react from a place of fear.

I've engaged in everything from shoplifting to underage drinking to unprotected sex out of fear that I wouldn't fit in, that I wouldn't be liked, that I would be rejected.  I overeat out of fear.  I stay in relationships and run from relationships out of fear.  I don't exercise out of fear.  I deprive myself of sleep out of fear.  I spend money out of fear.  I even read novels out of fear.

Sometimes I don't know the fear is there unless I look for it; it's just a dark guiding hand behind my actions.  Sometimes, the fear grips me, so tightly and unreasonably that it's impossible to see anything else.  But it is the first type of fear — the one I don't recognize, yet allow to direct me — that I find is most dangerous for me.

Through my recovery work, I've begun to recognize fear more readily and to start replacing it with faith.  Working this Step again has reminded me that this is a journey and a process during which I need to remain vigilant.  Fear is constantly by my side, taking the wheel whenever it has the chance.

There's a picture of me somewhere, when my son was a few months old, sitting at the computer and uploading pictures of him to share. I got lots of advice to sleep when the baby slept. I was told by plenty of people that those early sleepless days of parenthood are temporary, that things settle down eventually and I would sleep again. When that shift happened, I would have time for those things I ought to put off in favor of sleep now. That all made sense to me, yet I look at that picture and think about how isolated I felt and how desperately I wanted to do something that wasn't caring for an infant or sleeping, in spite of my utter, mind-numbing exhaustion. I was shocked at how completely my life, and even my body, was not my own anymore and I was determined to wrench some part of my time back to me, even at the cost of much needed rest.

I can't always see what self-care looks like. Was it good self care to push through sleep deprivation to do something that was fun for me and helped me reach out of my isolation to connect with loved ones? Or was it bad self care to add to the exhaustion that exacerbated my postpartum depression and contributed to near daily migraines?

It's something I struggle with to this day. I've had a tough week, full of difficult situations and painful emotions. And I've had to ask myself: is it good self care to skip exercise and meditation in favor of sleep or to skip sleep in favor of exercise and meditation? It's certainly not good self care to down several sugary, caffeinated Cokes and handfuls of cookies in order to stay awake. But it's also not good self care to snap at my kids and my husband because I haven't been able to carve out a quiet moment to myself to connect with my higher power and unwind.

The best I can do is feel my way through, because while I don't always know what self care looks like, I do know what it feels like, and I know, based on how I feel now, that whatever I have been doing, hasn't been quite the kind of self care I need right now.

Today I went to an event that included a reception beforehand with light refreshments and crowds of people I didn't know. While years of recovery work has me better equipped to step outside my usual comfort zone, these situations remain challenging for my introverted self. Not surprisingly, I found myself heading for the cookie plate like an alcoholic would head to the bar to get a little something to help loosen up.

I downed a handful of nuts and an alarming number of cookies while I surveyed the room until it occurred to me that I could leave the reception and return when the event began. I went off (with a few cookies for the road) and found a quiet little corner where I thought to myself (not for the first time), "I have a problem with food." Now the popular wisdom would have you believe that admitting you have a problem is the first step. But the popular wisdom is wrong. (Has the popular wisdom ever even read the actual First Step?)*

Admitting there is a problem is like standing up and getting read to take that first step; it's necessary for change, but it's not where change starts. , and for me to have the deep down willingness to do the kind of work it takes to make real changes in my life, I have to not only admit I have a problem, I have to admit I have a BIG problem: big enough to bump it ahead of the many other priorities in my life. And while I can answer "yes" to ten of , while I've known for years that I use food to self-medicate, while I know food is a "problem" for me, while I've thought about working on those issues, I'm still not ready to push my food issues to the top of my to do list. I haven't become ready to take the actual first of the 12 Steps and admit that I'm powerless over food and that my life is unmanageable.